Thursday, May 14, 2015

HITLER’S QUEST FOR OIL

For 1942 Hitler planned another Blitzkrieg campaign in
Russia. However, its scope, aims and overall goals were very different from
those of Operation Barbarossa. For a start the German army was incapable of a
strategic offensive across the whole of the Eastern Front. Despite its great
victories, the Wehrmacht had taken a severe battering at the hands of the
Russians in 1941–2. By March 1942 the Germans had suffered casualties of 1.1
million dead, wounded, missing or captured, some 35 per cent of their Eastern
army’s strength. Only eight out of 162 divisions were at full strength and
operational capacity. Some 625,000 replacements were needed to bring the
Eastern army back up to scratch. The army’s mobility was severely impaired by
the loss of 40,000 lorries, 40,000 motorcycles and nearly 30,000 cars, not to
speak of thousands of tanks. Of the 180,000 draught animals (mainly horses)
also lost as a result of enemy action, only 20,000 had been replaced by March
1942.

The only realistic option was an offensive on a single front.
Hitler’s attention focused on the southern front and on the quest for oil. In
the Transcaucasus, the area deep in the south of the USSR centred on the
Caucasus mountains, were the oil fields that supplied 90 per cent of Soviet
fuel. Hitler had both short- and long-term motives for wanting to seize these
oil fields. Denying the Russians their oil was one short-term aim; another was
the desperate need to increase oil supplies to Germany and its Axis allies.

In the longer term, Hitler needed the means to fight a
prolonged war of attrition against the Allies on a multiplicity of fronts. A
long war was clearly the only prospect in Russia, and Hitler worried
increasingly about the implications of the entry of the United States into the
conflict. American economic and military power had been crucial in swinging the
balance against Germany during the First World War. He was particularly
concerned about the danger to his Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) of an
Anglo-American invasion of France. Although that invasion did not take place
until June 1944, in mid-1942 it seemed a matter of months rather than years
away. German predominance, if not outright victory, had to be established on
the Eastern Front before the Allied invasion of France. In that event Germany would
be faced with the prospect of a two-front land war in Europe, which it would
inevitably lose. This was the background to Chief-of- Staff Halder’s statements
in March 1942 that the ‘war will be decided in the east’ and ‘only through the
possession of that territory [Transcaucasia] will the German war empire be
viable in the long-term’ (Boog et al, 2001, pp.844, 860). Hitler agreed. In
June 1942 he told his generals ‘if we don’t get to Maykop and Groznyy [Soviet
oil cities in Transcaucasia], I shall have to pack up (“liquidieren”) the war’
(Goerlitz, 1963, p.155).

A thrust to the Caucasus offered other economic advantages.
If the Germans did succeed in occupying Transcaucasia, including the Azerbaijan
oil capital of Baku, an important Allied supply route to Russia would be cut.
Anglo-American supplies shipped via the Persian Gulf would be forced to make a
huge detour through Kazakhstan in the Soviet central Asia. A German advance
south would involve occupation of the Donets Basin (the Donbas) – the mineral-rich
industrial heartland of the Ukraine – and conquest of the fertile lands of the
Don and Kuban rivers. Again, denial of these resources to the Russians loomed
large in Hitler’s calculations.

Finally, Hitler was anxious about the security of the Rumanian
oil fields in Ploesti – the main supplier of the German war machine. These oil
fields had been attacked a number of times by Soviet bombers. Damage was light
but the potential for a destructive air campaign was clear. ‘Now in the era of
air power’, Hitler had said in January 1941, ‘Russia can turn the Rumanian oil
fields into an expanse of smoking debris . . . and the very life of the Axis
depends on those fields.’

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.